Er… hello again. Hasn’t it been a long time? 18 months or so I reckon. Sorry for the delay in returning.

I’ve recently started a knitting-specific blog and I’m enjoying getting back into writing, so I thought I’d drop by here and see how you are all doing. I’m not intending to blog here regularly, but I might drop by every so often. I found that it got a bit difficult with work figuring out what is bloggable and most of the things I thought you might like to hear about were the things that I probably shouldn’t blog about. As a result, I just stopped writing altogether. Who knows, I may find some things to say here.

A few things have changed since I last wrote. Rusk is nearly 4 and has a baby sister (is Biscuit a good name?) who is coming up to 6 months old. I’m coming to the end of my maternity leave, having spent 7 months with me and Mr F at home together 24/7. Amazingly, we haven’t come close to killing each other, but have rediscovered that we get on quite well when there is time to spend together! When I go back to work, I’ll be heading into the last year of my curacy and almost immediately starting to look for a parish/benefice of my own or, as some friends have called it, I’ll be a ‘proper vicar’ at last.

So, how are you doing? What did I miss? I’m ashamed to say that I pretty much stopped reading the wibsite when I stopped posting. Haven’t stopped thinking about you all though, and it was lovely to see so many familiar names on the front page.

I’m knitting to a deadline – 4pm tomorrow. Between now and then I need to knit half a sock, get a good nights sleep, get up early with Rusk, take a picture of the completed knitting and upload it to the internet.

Something tells me there aren’t quite enough hours. I find it somewhat amusing that I can even struggle with deadlines for my hobbies (and this post comes to you at 23.52, sneaking in under the wire. Ridiculous.

So, it appears that yesterday I only thought about posting, but didn’t actually write. Serves me right for owning up to trying NaBloPoMo.

Today I have been into the local school to lead collective worship. We plan these a term at a time, so whichever member of the team are leading it should make sense and not end up with the same story three weeks running.

We are doing the beatitudes this half term and I volunteered for ‘blessed are the meek’. Sounds easy? Not so much, especially when I found that there don’t seem to be any assemblies online for 5-11 year olds based on blessed are the meek. Now I know why.

I really wanted to go into the link between blessed are the meek and turn the other cheek. With both of them, despite seeming to advocate being a total pushover, there is a sense of protest. Meekness in this context doesn’t mean being totally acquiescent to any unreasonable oppression. Rather, it is a measured response. You can still state how much the oppression is hurting you, and try to avoid it happening. The meekness comes in not getting angry or responding violently

Turning the other cheek is similar. The natural way for a right-handed person to slap someone is on the left cheek. Turning the other cheek requires them to either use their left hand (which in non-enlightened times was very much not done) or to hit back-handed. Hitting back-handed signified the total insignificance and humiliation of the person you are hitting. Volunteering to be humiliated in this way is meant to be a way of pointing out to the person hitting you the damage they are inflicting.

All very well and nicely intellectualised. Problems? For a start, there is little meaning to these codes of right-handed superiority and correct fighting any more. Then there is all the bullying of left-handers or putting into practice of hitting each other that might arise from an assembly on this subject.

I ended up using a box of duplo bricks tipped all over the floor to help illustrate this. Any guesses how?

Is this sudden deluge of posts after a long silence surprising? I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging at all, so this is a last ditch effort to test if I want to stay with it or stop for a while.

Deeleea inspired me to join in with NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month – and post every day of November. Following somewhat the dictates of William Morris, I’ll see whether what I manage to write by the end of November is either known to be useful or believed to be beautiful. If not, or if I don’t get a reasonable distance into the month, probably best to stop. Good thing you can schedule posts to publish ahead of time or I would have already missed a couple.

I’ve been away this weekend on a training course, learning more about preaching. They introduced us to some ideas from NLP (neuro-linguistic processing). I found it fascinating, but since it was the second session, I then spent a lot of energy during the rest of the weekend analysing the communication preferences and styles of the speakers rather than paying too much attention to the content. There were handouts, however, so I can go back and read them if I need to.

Hope you aren’t getting tired of seeing knitted socks. I’m afraid there are plenty more. I was holding back on blogging about knitting, but there isn’t really much else I can blog about at the moment.

These were done using a technique called festive knitting, that makes colourwork easier when knitting in the round. Not sure I totally got the hang of it, but they look ok on the outside. (Probably best not to look at the inside).

The knitting competition that I’ve been blogging about this week has a theme: Mad Men, the tv series. A lot of the techniques that are being introduced are fromthe 1960s and some of the patterns are directly inspired by the tv show.

I always meant to watch Mad Men, but never quite got round to it. Iron Knitter has persuaded me that I should try it, so I’ve started at series 4 on BBC4. I never normally watch things from halfway through, but I’m beginning to like it, although I have no idea of most of the character back-story. It is a very wordy series, similar to the West-wing in that nearly everything is in the dialogue, although less frenetic than WW. I love the sixties clothes and seeing how much society has changed for women.

Here is a picture of me as I would like to think I look in the style of Mad Men.

Yes, I have a piano accordion. No, my hair and glasses are not really like that. No, I have never worn a dress like that.

In between knitting socks, working and toddler time, in the last few weeks I read the Twilight series. I wasn’t sure what to expect. The Host, also by Stephanie Meyer was a really good book – brilliant sci-fi and completely un-put-downable, but there had been so much hype about Twilight that I was sceptical about it.

It turns out that there was no need for scepticism. I loved reading them – I haven’t devoured a whole series like that since I found Trudi Canavan’s Magician trilogy. It is a pity that they are so well known, because I already went into them knowing the whole vampire/werewolf/human aspect (and now you do too – sorry). The suspense of the reveal of each of the characters would have been interesting without notice.

The thing that I found most interesting was the struggle for morality. What is good and evil? Who has a soul? How much danger can you put someone you love into? I liked that Meyer redefined her vampires and werewolves – they don’t follow all the classic rules, so you never quite know their limits. I’ve given the books back to the person from book group who I borrowed them from. If not, I think I might have to read them through again to see what I missed the first time.